The 2020 race is heating up, and Joe Biden has his sights set on North Carolina. Voters beware.
The Biden campaign recently bulked up its staffing in the Tar Heel State, while also hosting virtual “listening sessions” aimed at North Carolina voters. At the same time, Team Biden is pumping millions of dollars into North Carolina advertising.
Part of the Biden pitch is a promise to repair race relations in states like North Carolina, where the African-American community makes up 22 percent of the population. In Biden’s words: “I will seek to heal the racial wounds that have long plagued this country.”
Don’t believe him. If any career politician has had the opportunity to heal those racial wounds, it is Joe Biden, whose tenure in Washington, D.C. spans four decades. Biden has had plenty of opportunities to change African-American lives for the better, and he has repeatedly failed. The Biden record is the same old bill of goods: Make empty promises, win election, promise more, and win re-election. Rinse, repeat.
Even worse, Biden’s record has made African-American lives demonstrably worse. If anything, it suggests a deep-seated resentment for minority communities.
Let’s look at the record. Joe Biden endorsed segregationists in the 1970s. Joe Biden supported the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which accelerated the mass incarceration of inner-city youths — or, as Biden calls them, “predators on our streets.” These are facts.
Do you know who bragged that Delaware was a slave state? Joe Biden. Do you know who used the N-word twice at a Senate committee meeting? Joe Biden. Do you know who claimed “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids”? Joe Biden.
In 1977, Biden argued that desegregation would lead his children to grow up in a “racial jungle.” Yet he’s now courting the African-American vote in racially diverse North Carolina?
Enough is enough. North Carolinians simply cannot put their faith in a man whose record evokes racism of the worst kind. For too long, minority communities have blindly put their faith in Democrats who promise government handouts, yet do nothing but treat those communities as if they’re second-class. Welfare programs, food stamps, and other forms of government assistance are simply tools for Democrats to win election and re-election, without solving the deeper issues troubling minority communities — from a lack of economic opportunity to crumbling family life.
If North Carolinians can put their faith in any candidate, it is President Trump. It is under the Trump administration that Black unemployment reached its lowest point in U.S. history. It is under the Trump administration that minority communities — those disproportionately affected by mass incarceration — could finally celebrate sweeping criminal justice reform legislation. President Trump’s criminal justice reform — the First Step Act — has already freed thousands of federal inmates on mandatory minimum sentences.
That is a record to reward, not Joe Biden’s 40 years of racial demagoguery. Team Biden’s campaign ads and catchy slogans may tell a story of racial harmony, but the truth reveals anything but.
North Carolina, you must reject the Democrats in 2020. The facts speak for themselves.
Ted Harvey serves as chairman of the Committee to Defend the President.